Beautiful Revenge (A Good Wife #1) - Sienna Blake Page 0,8

sweet and round, while her father’s is all shrunken cheeks and pointed chin. She’s only three years younger than me at eighteen, my husband’s daughter from his previous wife, now dead.

“Emily, you’re up.” She’s already dressed for the day in a long grey knit dress and semi-opaque stockings, a pair of ballet flats on her feet. I’m still in my silk dressing gown, my nightgown underneath.

“What shall we do today?” she asks.

Her smile is infectious. I feel myself dusting off all these old cobwebs. Emily is the one good thing in my life. The one joy. “Don’t you have a music lesson today? With Mrs Prim?”

She gives me a guilty look. “Um, she might have yelled at me last time, telling me that I was an untalented brat and that she was never coming back.”

“And what did you do to make her lash out like that?”

“Nothing.” The innocence in her face cracks. “Okay, so I may have told her that I didn’t want to do her boring old scales.”

I snort. “That should do it.”

“Besides, I will never be able to play the piano the way Father wants me to.”

“Because you won’t practice your scales.”

She screws up her face. “I swear she had a flute stuck up her ass.”

“Surely having something up your bum would make you a more pleasant person.”

“Alena!” Emily admonishes me, her cheeks blushing furiously.

Despite myself, I laugh. “Let’s go steal Mrs Bates’ work gloves and throw them up a tree.” Mrs Bates is the crotchety old housekeeper. She can’t stand Emily and me. We return the favour. It probably doesn’t help matters that we play tricks on her when we’re bored.

“Oooh, no, let’s act out one of your stories! Have you written any new ones?”

“Um, not recently.” I’m lying. I have been working on a story, a new story. I don’t want to share it. It’s too personal. Too raw. It’s taken me five years just to be able to start writing it down.

I do have lots of things to be grateful for. I never go hungry. We have a cook who lives with us on-site. I am never cold. I have real fur cloaks and this place is well heated. We have real fireplaces; some rooms have two. I have a small study down the hall, just for me, with my own desk that I always wanted, with lots of pens and paper and…

There’s just something missing. Someone missing.

Emily frowns at me, her eyes sliding past me towards my bedside table. “What’s that? I’ve never seen that before.”

My jaw tightens. I know exactly what’s she’s looking at. “Seen what?”

“That box.” Emily strides past me before I can stop her. “It doesn’t look like it belongs here.” She’s right. The simple box sticks out among all this elaborate, fussy luxury. She walks right to it and grabs it. The sight of my box in someone else’s hand makes my chest seize. I stop breathing for a second. It takes all of my willpower not to snatch the box from her grubby little hands. I almost cry when she shakes it, the contents rattling like dice in a cup. “What’s inside?”

My fingers flinch as I restrain myself from snatching it from her. The bigger deal I make out of it, the more Emily won’t leave it alone. “It’s nothing,” I say, trying to keep my voice casual. I fail.

“There’s something in there. I can hear it.”

I let out a curt, humourless laugh as I wave it off. “It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten what’s inside.”

“Let’s open it.”

“You can’t!”

“Why not?”

“I’ve…lost the key.”

Emily looks at me, a tiny crease between her brows. “Then why do you keep it?”

I shrug even as the pain lances me like someone has fisted the broken edges of the contents of the box into my chest. “It’s the only thing I have left from my life before here.” These are true words. And they are swollen with pain.

Emily’s frown deepens, sadness pulling down the corners of her mouth, adding to my guilt. “I thought we were friends, best friends.”

“We are.” She’s my only friend. She has been for five years.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s inside?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I snap. Leave it alone, you selfish girl. This is mine. Only mine.

Her face darkens. She knows I’m lying. “Best friends tell each other everything.”

Now I feel terrible. Terrible for lying. Terrible for my hateful thoughts towards her.

And yet, a part of me is dying to tell. Dying to unwrap this throbbing wound that has never